COMM lost way to many times

[mwtidd]

Originally Posted by Tanis

I highly recommend against hot gluing the plug into the radio (and I also advocate against hot gluing or taping ethernet cables and power cables pretty much anywhere). It makes replacing those wires later more difficult.

The radio's plug is particularly problematic with hot glue. You can no longer easily detach the radio from your robot to program it at events, and swapping out radios should yours need to be replaced for any reason suddenly becomes much more difficult.

Furthermore, the issues I have seen are generally not that this plug comes loose. The problems are generally that the wires going into the Weidmuller connections on the VRM have too much copper showing and are shorting out, or that there are loose wires elsewhere in the chain.

I had a team that had mummified their Ethernet ports on both the radio and roborRIO along with the USB cables going into the roboRIO and the power plug on the radio with electrical tape drop out during a match. Seriously, there was a large mound of the stuff over everything. They asked me if I thought they should add more electrical tape since they were still dropping out. At that point I demonstrated that the wires going to their radio were just falling out of the VRM with very little effort on my part.

Understand the problem before trying to apply bandaids. You might not even be putting the bandaids in the right spot.

Great callout Bryan. As he said, you should not have to apply hot glue on the connection between the radio and the plug, and that can definitely be problematic. We used hot glue to aid the Weidmuller connectors on the voltage regulator, but it certainly has drawbacks.

I'm a big fan of Alan's PoE idea for this particular problem